Winemakers in Nova Scotia figured out years ago that our climate and terroir are ideal for making sparkling wines and other whites.

Reds, with one or two notable exceptions, have been another matter, but now, using tricks of the trade and an experiment born in the Swiss Alps, Luckett Vineyards winemaker Mike Mainguy may have it solved.

There’s a reason people go to university and work as apprentices to properly learn winemaking; it’s more than buying a kit and fermenting your own grape juice. But even the most rigorous winemaking degree rarely includes a course on what to look for in an excavator.

“To put it pretty simply, we dug a big-ass hole in the bottom of the vineyard,” Mainguy says of the day he found himself building a chain collar for three 225-litre barrels of wine.

“The worst-case scenario was that we’d be out a few barrels; the best-case scenario was that we’d have something unique and special that people love, a one-of-a-kind product.”

Vineyard manager Marcel Kolb had spent years trying to convince Mainguy and their boss, Pete Luckett, that their wines would taste better if they spent a year buried deep underground. He’d seen it done in Switzerland, where winemakers have similar climactic challenges to those here in Nova Scotia.

“He’d been talking about it for a couple of years and I’d go ‘yeah, yeah, sure, sure’ but he kept talking about it, and then he had a visitor from the vineyard he worked at in Switzerland who brought a bottle of their buried wine for me to taste,” Luckett said.

“The whole buried thing, maybe it seems a bit hocus-pocus, and I’d be skeptical if I was a customer buying it, but the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. It does apply to the reds a little roundness, a little softness, a fuller taste, a nicer mouth feel. I’m not sure how or why … but it seems to be doing great stuff.

“We’ve done a taste test, blind, and the same grapes left out of the ground are distinctly different.”

Buried Red is made up of equal parts Lucie Kuhlman, Leon Millot and Marechal Foch. Last season, the first in which it was for sale, the limited amount Mainguy made sold out so fast it was obvious they needed to dig a bigger hole. Now there are 18 barrels underground.

“The romantic version is that we age the barrel in the same soil and earth that the vines grow in. The science guy in me was bouncing off the walls,” said Mainguy, whose initial skepticism has been reduced.

“It sounds corny, but it is earthier. It’s got these truffle-y notes to it that we didn’t see in the same wines when they were in the barrel room. The idea is that at that depth there is perfectly consistent humidity and temperature. There’s also limited exposure to oxygen.”

Buried Red is selling (like hotcakes) at $38 per bottle, the most expensive Luckett wine there is, and also the only one in which renting an excavator figures into the production costs.

Not quite as expensive, but already with a gold medal around its brand new neck is a wine called Black Cab, named top red at the recent Atlantic Canada Wine Awards.

Using the appassimento technique, pioneered in Nova Scotia by Bruce Ewert of l’Acadie, Mainguy created a wine much more tannic than Nova Scotia reds have been.

“Basically, you’re raisin-ing the grapes, removing the water component of the grape … concentrating the grape … so you’re left with very little quantity, but this concentrated flavour,” said Mainguy, who blended 60 per cent Cabernet Foch with 40 per cent castel. The castel was barrel-matured for 27 months, the Cab Foch for a year.

“That long barrel maturation really did wonders for the castel, which, that year, had high natural alcohols to it. So you’re ending up with this 13 per cent alcohol wine, naturally 13 per cent, something you don’t often see here with the red wines.”

Mark DeWolf was one of the judges that named Black Cab the top red in the region, and said it represents the evolution of Nova Scotia reds.

“The struggle has been to achieve a level of ripeness and structure,” he said. “What’s impressive about Black Cab … is that it represents a great style, and if it’s achievable, that’s fantastic.”

Mainguy made 220 cases of Black Cab, compared to 1,500 cases of the vineyard’s most popular product. It’s selling for $29.

“It’s certainly on the high end. A lot of that has to do with the fact that when you dry as much as we do, you’re losing a lot of volume. You’re sacrificing quantity for quality,” said Mainguy, who spent considerable time debating with his colleagues about what to call the wine.

“This was a big red wine that needed a big label and a good looking bottle. It’s a heavier, Burgundy-style bottle that we had never used before. We wanted it to stand out.”